understanding comic books

March 20, 2006 11:03 PM

A friend of mine recently told me that she can't read comic books. She doesn't have problems with understanding text or visual information. She's been a voracious book reader since a very early age and she's a dedicated film watcher. I didn't entirely understand her explanation but she says that she never learn to decode the tight coupling of textual and visual information in comic books. Has anyone heard about or experienced something similar?

I don't think that she finds comic books completely incomprehensible. She just can't casually read them.

posted by rdr to writing & language (23 comments total)

I don't think that she finds comic books completely incomprehensible. She just can't casually read them.

If comprehension isn't the problem is it just that she doesn't enjoy reading them?

she never learn to decode the tight coupling of textual and visual information in comic books

somewhat off topic: I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I know there are comic books with no text.
posted by juv3nal at 11:07 PM on March 20, 2006

Somewhat. I tend to concentrate far too exclusively on text. Regardless of the situation, if there's text, it's the first thing I notice and I tend to exclude anything else.

So when I read a comic book, I pretty much read the text and ignore the images unless I force myself to slow down or find it (e.g., Maus) highly moving. as a result, I don't tend to read comics or enjoy them if I do.
posted by orthogonality at 11:13 PM on March 20, 2006

To experience something similar, look over a few unreformatted manga's next time you're at the comic shop. If you're not familiar with the Japanese style of right to left and back to front, there's a dissonance that makes it hard to focus.
It's a matter of training yourself to process it properly.

As juv3nal said, your gal may not be interested in reading enough comics to get over that hump.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:31 PM on March 20, 2006

Sure; it's actually a pretty common barrier for folks who never grew up with comics. Comics fans tend to take for granted things like the direction eyes are supposed to move over panels and pages, and even basic visual vocabulary items like motion lines or dotted lines to indicate invisibility. If you toss in an even slightly experimental approach to panel boundaries and placement of word balloons, it's easy to see how a comics page can be confusing to even a smart newbie.

orthogonality's dead-on, too; I've been reading comics all my life and frequently have to remind myself to slow down and not prioritize text so much.

What comics is she looking at, btw? Most of the better ones (Chris Ware, Joe Sacco) aren't what I'd call "casual" reads.
posted by mediareport at 11:39 PM on March 20, 2006

...is it just that she doesn't enjoy reading them?

That's what I suspect. She might be telling you in a very nice way that she hates comics.

Suppose her opinion is, for example, that comics are tedious and puerile, and that she doesn't know how anyone over the age of 12 can read them. Just supposing.

Saying that to a comics fan could have various undesirable outcomes (hurting someone's feelings, getting into a debate that is only interesting to comics fans, being loaned comics she doesn't want to borrow, etc.).

So instead, she quite brilliantly puts the blame on herself and leaves people discussing psychology instead of the latest issue of Big-Eyed Mystery Girls in Skirts.

That's one theory, anyway.
posted by pracowity at 11:54 PM on March 20, 2006

I also have a friend who has trouble reading comics. She says her eyes want to look at the pictures first before reading the text; by the time she's looked through all the art on the page she's either spoiled the plot or gotten confused.

It has nothing to do with her relative interest in reading comics.
posted by samh23 at 12:04 AM on March 21, 2006

I'm still an avid manga reader (I'm Japanese BTW, so being a 36-year-old manga reading mom doesn't mean I'm a weirdo. ...Or does it?) and have always been since I was a kid, but I've always had friends who could never "get into" comics. I remember one particular friend who told me that she couldn't figure out which way to go next (kind of like what Alvy Ampersand said, but I'm talking about Japanese people who are used to reading books from right to left) and that she couldn't be bothered. I've never had any trouble following the order of the koma, as the frames are called in Japanese, and it never occurred to me until then that there are people who couldn't (or had to think about it). My 8-year-old loves reading comic books, but some of his friends don't read them at all, so I think either you can and get hooked on it for life (like me), or you can't and just go without. So even here in Japan, where reading comic books is a much more common and mainstream thing to be doing from a young age, there are people who can't seem to do it casually and enjoy it.
posted by misozaki at 12:20 AM on March 21, 2006

My wife also claims to be utterly unable to comprehend comic books. She says she simply can't follow how the action correlates to the words and gets easily confused by page flow. "Who's talking now? Does this happen before this or after? What am I supposed to look at next?"
posted by frogan at 12:42 AM on March 21, 2006

I agree with mediareport, and it can really depend on the comic book. It doesn't have to be experimental or anything, regular superhero stuff with edgy layouts can throw novice readers. Heck, I've read comics since forever and I remember coming across an issue of X-Men in high school that me and my friends agreed was completely incomprehensible. (This was about 1990.) It depends on how much the artist depends on the reader knowing comic conventions, and whether he bothers to follow them himself, and sometimes just the writing – this can be because of pushing the envelope or just incompetence on the part of the creator.

They understand comic strips, right?
posted by furiousthought at 1:41 AM on March 21, 2006

I read a lot of comics when I was a kid, but have only just begun to look at them again (thanks to an xmas present of "strangers in paradise"). First time round, I read it really quickly and there were quite a few bits I didn't understand - I expect I just read the words. It was interesting and entertaining enough to warrant a second read pretty much immediately though, and I definitely got more out of it second time round. I noticed that I was concentrating on the images for the second read, and returning to earlier pages - it was as though the plot and the words dragged me through at their own pace, first time round, and I only stopped to enjoy the view on second read. Upon reflection I expect I do this with ordinary fiction too as it is quite easy for me to get drawn along by a plot.

I've just got books 2 and 3 off amazon - I'll let you know how I get on!
posted by handee at 2:18 AM on March 21, 2006

Scott McCloud to the rescue!
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:30 AM on March 21, 2006

My wife made objections similar to frogan's, but they went away when I presented her with something that caught her interest. It still took a bit of explaining on the things that are non-intuitive to those poor souls who missed out on comics as kids (all those creatively flowed text boxes that I think are neat are something of a challenge for new readers).
posted by yerfatma at 4:38 AM on March 21, 2006

A second for mediareport and orthogonality - I'm one of those deprived people who grew up comic-free, and had the experience of learning to read them as an adult. I generally pick things up pretty fast, but it was still a weird and disorienting experience - "but what's going on? I don't get it! This is supposed to be for kids, right? I must truly be a moron" and so forth.

Reading a comic book requires a slightly different set of skills and conventions from reading text - but if you had the advantage of learning them while young, you probably don't remember doing so.
posted by hilatron at 4:38 AM on March 21, 2006

I'm currently doing my master's paper on librarians' attitudes towards comic books, and several of them have reported that they just didn't have the ability to make sense of comics; like mediareport says, there's a lot of visual vocabulary they don't seem to have. (And incidentally, a lot of the 'good' comics take more comics-reading skills to read, which leads to the same problem one faces in learning to read as an adult; all the books you'd actually be interested in are way above your level).
posted by Jeanne at 4:51 AM on March 21, 2006

Thanks for the answers, all.

Just to follow up to some of the points people brought up.

She's a pretty direct person. If she doesn't want to read something she'll tell me.

Interestingly, Maus is the only graphic novel she's read. Probably for exactly the reasons orthogonality was able to enjoy it.

I going to try Ampersand experiment sometime soon.

Becoming aware that comic reading is a skill separate from reading might allow me to appreciate a broader range of comics. The next time I run into a stylistically adventurous comic that I dislike intensely I'm going to think about how much of my reaction is to the work and how much is to my expectations being tweaked.
posted by rdr at 4:51 AM on March 21, 2006

I'm another that has trouble with comics.

I didn't read them much as a kid (just a couple of big books of collections, mostly), and I haven't spent much time with them as an adult, either. I'm much more verbal than visual, and I never, ever got into the 'zone' with them. With a book, I can just be _gone_, but comics were always a struggle.

I keep thinking about picking up the Sandman collection from Amazon, because everyone says it's so amazing. (after the first book, anyway, I think folks said Book 1 was a little boring.)

So, if I can be so rude as to piggyback a question here, would that be a good spot to start? Any other suggestions?
posted by Malor at 4:55 AM on March 21, 2006

Owly is a current wordless comic. I think that people who have a hard time reading comics might enjoy some of Andi Watson's work. He has a great sense of design, and his illustrations are clear and easy to follow.
posted by gnat at 5:36 AM on March 21, 2006

This "problem" is actually incredibly common. It's a matter of the rhetorical structuring that accompanies the genre. It's the same problem as taking someone who is used to reading Time magazine and USA Today and getting them to read an academic research article. Or someone who is used to reading the New Yorker and having them read a military report or government document. Or getting a lawyer who only ever reads briefs to pick up a difficult novel.

There are many ways that information can be presented into straight text alone, and we are better at reading the ways we are most familiar with. When you add additional visual elements that both arrange and order as well as carry symbolic content, deciphering becomes more complicated. It can still be done, and the more it is done the easier it gets, but doing it requires more effort and is less precise.

Text is much more vastly differentiated than what most people realize. It's fascinating really.
posted by mrmojoflying at 5:49 AM on March 21, 2006

I second the recommendation for Scott McCloud's book; it's fantastic and really freaking smart, and it (finally) gave me a good experience with comics. I usually have a hard time reading them because I just read all the text and get overwhelmed and confused by the images (when do you look at them? before? during? after? for how long? why bother? couldn't they have made this book without pictures, for pete's sake?).
posted by unknowncommand at 6:02 AM on March 21, 2006

Yeah, McCloud's book is great (Reinventing Comics is good too, but is geared towards folks who're more comics-savvy than the casual fan.) Other creators/comics I'd recomend for non-comics readers include stuff by Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Craig Thomp|son, and Alex Robinson.
All are really engaging writers who illustrate and lay out their panels in clear, concise layouts(mostly).
YMMV; Ware is a design genius, whose work can be both incredibly clear and staggeringly complex, while Robinson's art is endearingly rough, but wonderfully conveys emotion and suits the tone and temperament of his writing incredibly well.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 7:05 AM on March 21, 2006

Strange, in many countries photonovellas are very popluar because many people do not have the patience to read a lengthy book without pictures. Photonovellas are just comics with photos instead of drawings.
posted by JJ86 at 7:05 AM on March 21, 2006

The Graphic Novels for Snobs AskMe might be useful, too.
posted by mediareport at 7:51 AM on March 21, 2006

Like Malor and unknowncommand, I find comics and graphic novels a lot more work than straight text. I'm highly left-brained and reading text is fast and easy for me. But when there are pictures the right hemisphere has to get involved. I have to stop reading, look at the pictures, read a litte more, check out some more pictures, etc. Neither hemisphere gets to take over the job - they are constantly trading back and forth. To me it feels like getting stuck in stop-and-go traffic, never getting up to speed or staying in gear.

Watching movies is primarily a right-brain task so one hemisphere can do the heavy lifting while the other relaxes a bit. I suspect that people who are a bit "lopsided" (i.e., one hemisphere is strongly dominant) don't enjoy tasks that require a lot of switching back and forth. Many people are not so hemisphere-dominant, and they can switch between and right- and left-brained tasks with ease.

There's a whole 'nother level of understanding the stylistic conventions of comics and graphic novels, but I think that if your brain works the right way, you'll pick that up pretty quickly. If not, you'll probably always prefer plain text or pure visuals.

/Hubby is strongly right-brained and we get into some baffling misunderstandings, so I think about this stuff a lot/
posted by Quietgal at 9:05 AM on March 21, 2006